On a weekend night, there is an amazingly robust and dynamic atmosphere at Brü Restaurant on Lakeshore Road East in Oakville, and it's a restaurant vibe that I love: loud but not too loud; active but not too active. There's…

It’s always surprising how such good stuff can come from seemingly unlikely settings. When you go to a restaurant, for instance, and enjoy a great meal, there is a very good chance that even the exterior setting of the restaurant is…

Conestoga College, in partnership with the Ontario Dairy Council (ODC) and French-language college La Cité, will launch a new Centre of Excellence for cheesemaker training that will feature the province’s most extensive hands-on training programs to address the growing demand…

You’ll find a Ricarda’s in downtown Toronto and one in downtown Oakville; the former is a much larger venue than its Oakville sibling with its seating for under 70, but those customers will be sampling Ricarda's chef de cuisine Mitch…

As January starts to head into February — and we head into the coldest and seemingly longest parts of winter — here's a warming event worth the short drive to Oakville: A Taste of Oakville. Like other “Winterlicious-” or “Summerlicious-type” food…

Teaching mixology at Conestoga College combined with his role as owner-operator at Grand Trunk Saloon and the newly opened Grand Surf Lounge in downtown Kitchener seems the perfect mix for Darryl Haus.The chef and restaurateur, long a part of the…

Conestoga College culinary graduate Alex Krawczyk remains a student of his craft, perhaps more than ever as he oversees the kitchen at downtown Kitchener's new--and popular--The Grand Surf Lounge. The Kitchener resident and graduate of Resurrection High School draws heavily…

Stratford-born Kris Schlotzhauer opened AO Pasta on Erie Street in downtown Stratford in June, 2018, with the intent of re-vectoring the concept of a restaurant and professional kitchen in order, really, to make it more humanly possible to work there.…

The Fat Sparrow Group continues to grow, and it has spread its wings into St. Jacobs, the company's first foray outside of Uptown Waterloo. That's exciting -- and really good news for Waterloo Region. With four Uptown Waterloo restaurants --…

"We used to go to the Atwater Market quite often," Grant Holdbrook says of the 85-year-old Montreal icon. It seems that the Montreal-born chef at TWH Social in the historic Walper Hotel has had a long interest in the professional…

Cooking instructor Philippe Saraiva is serious about knives. And as a purist and aficionado who owns over 150 knives of various sizes and provenance, he throws down the gauntlet on how important it is to keep your knife sharp. "It…

The origin and success of Chopan Kabob on Highland Road West near Belmont Avenue is, to my thinking, something that makes Canada great. Tucked into the small food-hub of a plaza with McMullan’s Canadian Pub and Grill House and the…

Food and the love of it is a part of Carrie Herzog’s very DNA. The Kitchener resident and Waterloo Region native has a solid family food background based in the region, and she draws on that in her teaching hospitality…

Whether it's butternut or acorn, it's squash season -- and it has been since 5,000 BCE. Humankind has been cultivating and eating the humble vegetable for a long time, whether Asian, North or South American squash varieties. It’s a remarkable…

The damp, the rain, the leaves and the cool weather: it's fall. But fall can also mean some interesting and delicious beer flavours, including a new batch of beauties by the folks at Wellington Brewery in Guelph. The brewery opened…

With a couple of baking labs that can hold 24 students, a butchery area and research kitchen at her disposal, Sabine Heinrich-Kumar and her colleagues are ready to help Conestoga College’s culinary arts program reach new heights. Overseeing Conestoga’s baking…

39 Carden Street Bistro 39 Carden Street Guelph, Ontario N1H 3A2 (519) 265-8338 Cost: Dinner for two of snacks, cocktails, glasses of wine is $100 Open: Daily ***** I imagine that if you were to drop in magically from out…

For Paul Gauthier, cooking is a blend of science and ratios and letting the free-spirit of culinary invention roam. It's a combination the Conestoga College culinary grad has worked on mastering while in the kitchens of a number of high-profile…

Hi there food community. This happens too much, as we know, but we need to come together and support each other when it does. Waterloo Region chef Sarah Sharkey has been diagnosed with a sudden cancer, and a one at…

Recently appointed to the role of executive chef at Conestoga College's new (and as yet unnamed) restaurant at the Waterloo Campus, Brad Lomanto has a long cooking resume, the last eight years of which have been at Cambridge's luxe Cambridge…

At only 31 years of age, chef and restaurateur Harrison Hennick has considerable cooking experience behind him – and with a couple of new projects on the horizon considerable work ahead of him. The co-owner of Hamilton’s Nique restaurant, along…

If you love a wide variety of local beers like I do, then this might interest you as a summer beer adventure: Head out on the Brewery Discovery Routes of Ontario, a series of nine self-guided craft beer, cider and…

Launched in 2017, Merit Brewing Co. is one of a number of new food and beverage businesses that is marking something of a renaissance taking place in Hamilton. That is very good to see -- for any city. Located on…

Eatdrink magazine has arrived in Waterloo Region and Wellington County. The neat and compact publication has served the communities of London and Stratford and much of southwestern Ontario with entertaining and enlightening stories about the finer aspects of eating and…

Harmony Lunch 90 King Street North Waterloo, Ontario N2J 2X4 (519) 886-4721 Open: daily Cost: breakfast and coffee for two is $25 before taxes and tip ***** Breakfast is the best. In fact, there is little like a good breakfast.…

TWH Social Bar | Bistro 1 King Street West Kitchener, ON N2G 1A1 (519) 745-8478 Facebook.com/TWHSocial/ Cost for two with wine: $75 Open: daily ***** If you focus and use your imagination, the bones of TWH Social Bar | Bistro…

It's not easy to find stracciatella here in Waterloo Region. There's a dearth of Italian restaurants, and the few we do have don't seem to serve stracciatella as part of their regular menus. The dish is essentially a Roman egg…

Consider the egg. It has a perfect and luscious shape. It symbolizes birth, re-generation, growth. In the Upanishads, written 800 years before the Christian Era, the egg is essentially the Creation myth: "In the beginning, this world was non-existent. It…

Sandwiches are the stuff of myth. In the 1760s, John Montagu, the gambling 4th Earl of Sandwich, a town in southeastern England, denied himself food for 24 hours while at his game of cribbage before he eventually succumbed to eating:…

Root crops like parsnips, beets, and carrots are staple foods for hundreds of millions of people while most of us use them as a side dish to our centre-of-plate proteins. However, having often enjoyed mini-tasting menus of fresh heirloom vegetables…

From now until September, it’s the summer of Ontario sweet peppers grown in the field locally rather than their cross-continent trucked-in cousins. The term “peppers” causes some confusion: both the very hot and spicy chile peppers and the common, mild…

For Arron Carley, the past, the present and the future of cooking Canadian food are inextricably linked. Understanding the history of what we have cooked and eaten in the past and what we eat today are integral determinants of what…

Pasta comes umpteen ways to your table: alfredo, arrabbiatta, con vongole. But a favourite -- and it's a style that I'd like to see more in Waterloo Region restaurants -- is carbonara. The Roman dish traditionally consists of noodles (often…

We have unique Uyghur food in Waterloo Region (see my previous story here), and now we have a cuisine of northwestern China called Qin or Shaanxi. While the cooking itself includes a few sub-regional styles, the pork and mutton that…

A delicious fish stew, bouillabaise derives from a cooking technique that breaks down into two words: we start with the French verb bouillir to boil. We then add to it the verb for "reduce" -- abaisser -- and the concept…

The Bauer Kitchen (TBK) executive chef Brian McCourt is an Irish breakfast specialist. You could even say that McCourt, born in Dublin, Ireland, has puddings, rashers of bacon, pork sausage, baked beans and fried tomatoes in his blood. The breakfast,…

Just about every country has a version of a dumpling: har gow for dim sum, Russian (and possibly Siberian) pelmeni, Japanese gyoza. The Italian version is gnocchi. Usually made with potato, gnocchi (which is not pronounced "no-key") is a blank…

Check this out. It's pretty cool: "The Three Sisters," they're referred to and they reach far back into past agrarian systems. Winter squash, corn (maize) and beans: they have an autumnal quality to them, and a lot of history too.…

Here's a delicious dish and a bit of a mystery too. The burek is a Turkish and Middle Eastern and East European pastry -- often eaten as a snack from a street vendor -- that contains vegetables, potatoes, cheese and…

This is a new favourite cheese of mine: "Brigitte" from Best Baa Dairy in Conn, Ont., just a few minutes north of Fergus. It's ooey-gooey delicious and a real, bona fide treat. Brigitte is made with Reblochon in mind. The…

Tempeh -- tian bei -- is an Indonesian invention that takes dehulled soybeans that have been fermented with a special mold to produce a nutritious pressed cake that is very versatile. It has a yeasty, mushroom-like and nutty flavour when…

“Boyle these shell fishes: then flowre and frye them: then put them into a Pipkin, with a pinte of Claret Wine, Sinamon, Sugar, and Pepper. Take your Ducke boyled or roasted, and put them into two severall Pipkins, if one be boyled, and the other roasted and a little Sugar, large Mace, and fryed toasts, stuck around about it with Butter.”by John Murrell, A New Booke of Cookerie (1615); Cooking with Shakespeare (Morton and Coppolino, Greenwood Press, 2008)